日本における家庭電力消費量の地域的パターン

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to present the distribution of electricity consumption per household in Japan and its change during the period from 1960 to 1975.This study deals with the consumption of electricity for home use, which has increased more rapidly compared to that for commercial-industrial use(Fig. 1), and was less influenced by economic change in the period after 1960.The first step of this study is to discuss the factors of the distribution of electricity consumption. Income and the ratio of non-agricultural workers of each prefecture which was used to measure the degree of urbanization were discussed. These values have the high coefficient of determination of 0.76 and 0.79 respectively with electricity consumption in 1960. These coefficients, however, are much smaller in 1970's. The purchase of air conditioner is influenced in part by climatic condition.The distribution of electricity consumption per household and its rate of increase in each five years are shown in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4. In 1960, electricity consumption was large in urbanized prefectures of Osaka, Tokyo, and Aichi, and small in rural area. However, this difference became smaller in 1965 and 1970. In 1975, the consumption was large in central Japan with its core in Hokuriku District and small in Hokkaido and Kyushu.Two sets of regression analysis are made in each year with income per household or ratio of non-agricultural workers of each prefecture as an independent variable, and electricity consumption per household as a dependent variable. If we raise the level of generalization of residual distribution, we can identify two patterns as follows. Central Japan has high level of electricity consumption, whereas rest of Japan has low level of consumption. Electricity consumption in North-East Japan is more influenced by income, whereas the factor of urbanization is stronger in South-West Japan.Regional devision of Japan in terms of electricity consumption is the subject for a future study, although Fig. 7 is one of the examples.